Weatherhead School’s Michael Goldberg among speakers at TEDxFulbright in California

Michael Goldberg

Michael Goldberg, an assistant professor at Case Western Reserve Weatherhead School of Management, will be speaking at TEDxFulbright, at Santa Monica College Performing Arts Center in California on Saturday, Sept. 26. The prestigious program has been designed under the interdisciplinary theme “Fights Worth Fighting.”

Goldberg’s Fulbright experiences have involved presenting entrepreneurship in parts of the world where new businesses have plenty of space to take root and grow, but not much financial backing. He was awarded Fulbright fellowships to teach entrepreneurship at the National Economics University in Hanoi, Vietnam (2012) and at the Polytechnic in Windhoek, Namibia (2015).

The upcoming TEDxFulbright gathering is an opportunity for Goldberg to reflect on his Fulbright-inspired massive open online course (MOOC), “Beyond Silicon Valley: Growing Entrepreneurship in Transitioning Economies,” which has attracted more than 58,000 students from 190 countries and has been translated into 13 languages.

Goldberg, in the Department of Design and Innovation, also spoke about his MOOC at TEDxHeraklion in Crete in February 2015. He has taught courses on entrepreneurial management and finance at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey and the ALBA Graduate School of Business in Athens, Greece. He has conducted seminars on behalf of the U.S. Department of State on entrepreneurship in Botswana, Cambodia, Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, Laos, Macedonia, Morocco, Myanmar, Namibia, Spain, Tunisia, Vietnam, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

“I plan to share anecdotes from some of my MOOC students from around the world,” Goldberg said. “It’s amazing to see the impact we have had, particularly in the developing world.”

The content of his MOOC is also a SAGES seminar this semester at Case Western Reserve.

TEDxFulbright board member Ramesh Ramakrishnan said event planners are pleased that Goldberg will be among “an elite set of internationally acclaimed speakers, who include dreamers, scientists, artists, entrepreneurs and inspirational leaders.”